Category: Chicken doors

Building a coop offers chickens a sheltered place to hide out from the harsh elements like rain, snow, heat and cold. A well built coop will also protect them from predators and ensure them healthy, comfortable life. In addition they will produce quality eggs in return.There are a number of things that lurk in the shadows waiting for the chance to get your chickens…

A safe coop is a necessity for anyone raising chickens, and fortunately there are many different chicken coop designs available. Materials such as PVC pipes, tarps, converted old campers, have all actually been used material for chicken coops, however well constructed wood sheeted coop is the safest and most common way for building chicken coops.

However before purchasing a chicken coop kit, keep in mind the size of the coop run and number of chickens the coop will host. Each chicken needs at least 2 sq feet of space and larger breeds of poultry may need at least 4 to 5 sq feet of space. New lumber can be expensive to purchase, depending on the size of the coop: some second hand stores actually sell used lumber that works just as good!

Although it is relatively simple to build a coop to keep chickens in from scratch, many people simply don’t have the carpentry skills and prefer to purchase chicken coop kits instead. Most chicken coop kits come with all the necessary materials required for constructing the perfect home in which their hens will be safe.

A safe coop should be entirely enclosed leaving no opportunities for crafty critters to find a way in.

It also should include well ventilation in the summer and be well insulated in the winter. (These areas should be reinforced with chicken wire fencing to keep anyone from scratching through them)

If you desire to have a fenced in area for your chicken the most cost effective way to do this is to construct a chain link fence around the designated area for your chickens (chicken wire or netting may be equally as economical).

1. After constructing the fence wrap it in chicken wire to keep smaller critter like mink, weasels, and cats from getting through it. Mink only need a small hole of

2 inches in order to get through.

3. Also to protect from things climbing over and birds of prey, wrap the chicken wire fencing over the top so nothing can climb/fly over.

4. Finally, dig a one foot trench around the base of the chain link fence and tie you chicken wire to it allowing it to drop down into the trench. Now simply reapply the dirt and burry the fencing.

Finally an Automatic Chicken Coop Doorcan greatly improve your chance of avoiding a predator getting into your chicken coop. The majority of chicken attacks happen in the evening as most predators to chicken are nocturnal hunters. If you are new to chicken keeping you soon will realize the struggle of rushing home from work or from dinner with friends to be sure the chicken coop door gets closed before a local predator pops in for a snack. You number one defense against these attacks and fatalities are to automated the opening and closing of your chicken coop door. As an added bonus to a door closing automatically when your not home it will also open back up the following morning to let the chickens back outside. This gives both you and the chickens the freedom you want. This makes chicken keeping less of an obligation while also keeping the “girls” safe.

Taking these proper precautions will help your chickens to have a safe place to enjoy the outside but still remaining safely out of reach of predators so you can rest easily.

We’re on vacation this week, so I thought you might enjoy hearing from another chicken-related inventor. Jeremy Smith came up with a low-cost, dependable, premade automatic chicken coop door to protect his flock, then decided to share his invention with the world. I’ll let him tell you more in his own words.

— Anna

In our quest to find a door that was reliable and safe to use in our own chicken’s house, we came up very short. There is simply not much available out there. So, the master carpenter who works for me and I began designing our own coop door opener that would be trustworthy and that would cause our coop to be secure should we ever not be available to get the girls closed up at night.

After designing and building our door for our own coop, we realized that we had something that other people like yourself might find useful in keeping your own flock. I know that our 28 Buff Orpingtons have been quite an investment in money, time and even care. It took 6 months of feeding, safeguarding and caring for before we ever saw our first egg, so you can imagine our concern when we found cats, raccoons, coyotes, you name it trying to enter our chicken’s coop.

Who would have known that my family would have started keeping chickens much less be so concerned about their welfare? My wife who hated the idea of keeping chickens at first would now be heartbroken if something got a hold of one of our girls. If you have chickens, you know how much of a pet they can become. So we designed this Automatic Chicken Coop Door to help us protect our chickens but also give us our sanity back knowing that our chickens will be safe.

Since we created our own door we wanted to share it with all the other chicken owners out there so they could enjoy chickenkeeping without the constant worry for their flock’s safety. To that end, we now offer a DIY version for $124.95 and a premade version for $184.99 to make predator prevention even easier for the busy homesteader. Because every chicken deserves a safe nighttime roost!